The subject matter described herein relates to adjacent search results exploration in an image retrieval system. An image retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a repository of digital images. Many image retrieval systems add metadata, e.g., captioning, keywords, or descriptions, to the images so that retrieval can be performed utilizing the metadata. This type of search is called an image meta search. It allows a user to look for images using keywords or search phrases. As a result, a user can receive a set of images that can reference image resources, e.g., thumbnail images, and can be sorted by relevancy.
In use, a user can perform an image search by searching for image content using an input query. The relevant images are presented to a user and the user can browse the relevant images for a desired image. An image presented can include a static, graphic representative of some content, for example, photographs, drawings, computer generated graphics, advertisements, web content, book content or a collection of image frames, for example, a movie or a slideshow.